Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Matthias Andree
2005-12-04T13:28:21Z

On Sun, 04 Dec 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 13:12 +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
> > On Sat, 03 Dec 2005, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> >
> > > These folks have nothing new to innovate here. The memory manager and VM
> > > gets revamped every other release. Exports get broken, binary only
> > > module compatibility busted every rev of the kernel. I spend weeks on
> >
> > Who cares for binary modules?
> >
> > It hurts however if external OSS modules are broken.
>
> then those modules should be submitted realistically. That's just best
> for everyone involved. Which modules in particular do you mean btw?

I meant the ipmi, smbus and copa modules by Fujitsu-Siemens.

They are provided in source form, but I just found out (reading the
headers and not just the lines that broke the compile) they are not open
source. Perhaps one should prod them to slap a modified-BSD or perhaps
GPL label onto their modules.

It seems you'd then maintain them after their submission? :-)

> It's rare even in the 2.6 tree to mass-break well written drivers. Just
> because it's a lot of work to fix all in kernel drivers up. But a fully
> stable API is also not good. My guess is that the drivers that break
> most are the ones using the not-right APIs (eg internals and such).

These use inter_module_get() (ok, inter_module_get_request isn't
difficult) and some #include headers that have moved around between
linux and asm directories.

--
Matthias Andree